The Great Dying by Kathleen Jones

For those whose bones

lie only an inch under the grass

I have only words.

Below the skin of moss or turf

they lie where they were felled

in  hundreds

where the trees are greenest.

There are places yet to find

where the teeth of ancestors

still speak to us from the forest floor

among the foxgloves and pine needles

and sapling spruce.  Or woven among

the roots of a hundred year old hemlock

downed in the last El Nino wind.

And sometimes the storms

will show a father,

teaching his son the old places,

caves stacked with

cedar boxes and a shaman’s staff wedged

between stones in the roof.

The laughing picnickers,

whose yacht is moored offshore,

know nothing of a genocide;

the baby sucking at a rotting breast

grandparents too weak to gather food

a girl abandoned out of fear.

The mortuary stench that kept the ships

from shore has long since vanished

but the bones

like human cruelty

are  more firmly rooted. 

© Kathleen Jones

Posted on The Tuesday Poem with permission.

Editor, Helen McKinlay

Kathleen Jones, is a fellow Tuesday Poet, whose blog I have long enjoyed and admired, so I am delighted to post 'The Great Dying' and the fascinating and moving story behind this poem's very recent conception.  Kathy had started writing poems based on the mythology of the people of 

Haida Gwaii off the coast of British Colombia. 

Haida Gwaii (literally "Islands of the Haida people.") Once known as the Queen Charlotte Islands and the Charlottes, it is an archipelago on the North Coast of British Columbia, Canada, and the Haida people make up approximately half of its population. Kathy, being the meticulous researcher she is, set about planning a trip to Canada to visit these islands, earlier this year:

 "It's one of the scariest trips of my life. I'm heading for the wilderness, more than 1,000 miles north of Vancouver, off the coast of Alaska."

Kathy in Vancouver Island, near totems of the coastal Salish people.

Kathy tells us about her trip and how it affected her:
"I went to Haida Gwaii, a group of remote islands off the coast of British Columbia, to finish a collection of poems rooted in First Nation mythology, but then, found myself in the middle of a big debate about the terrible effects of colonisation in the 19th and 20th centuries. The Canadian government had commissioned a report called Truth and Reconciliation, designed to find out just what had happened and acknowledge a genocide, both physical and cultural.  A population of more than 20,000 people was reduced to 500 within a couple of decades.                                                        

A Raven Pole from the abandoned village of Skedans

"In some places so many people died, there was no-one left to bury the dead. I visited one of these villages, where the scattered bones lie just under the surface and found it a very moving experience. I was taken there by the grandchild of one of the survivors who told me the stories that are in the poem."  


Kathy went on to say how inspired she was by the people:  "their tenacity in the face of cultural annihilation, and their current determination to save their landscape from environmental destruction by loggers and oil companies."

A House Pit in the Abandoned Village

Kathy describes her visit to the abandoned village in her blog.

"The Haida refer to it as ‘The Great Dying.’ In 1862, an epidemic of small pox, brought by the Europeans, wiped out whole communities, particularly on the southern islands of the Gwaii. One of my goals in coming here was to try to get to some of these abandoned villages. The southern part of Haida Gwaii is now a nature reserve and, apart from a small airstrip and village at the top of Moresby Island, is not inhabited at all. I drove down the east coast of the northern island to the township of Skidegate and immediately started asking how I could get into the south. The B and B I was staying in said that they were taking a group by boat the following day and would I like to join them? Would I! The weather wasn’t good, but it would have taken a small army to keep me from going…"  Read  more

And the end result? "Going to Haida Gwaii altered my project," Kathy told me. "I began to write a travel journal which became a journey through the social history, geography, environmental concerns and mythology of the islands of Haida Gwaii;  the poetry is still there, but it's taken a back seat for the moment until I get the prose finished."

Bio and Publications in Brief:
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Kathleen Jones

Kathleen Jones writes biography and fiction (available as both print and e books) as well as poetry. Her first full collection,  Not Saying Goodbye at Gate 21, (Templar Poetry 2011) was joint winner of the Straid Collection Award. She has been described by Carol Ann Duffy as ‘a powerful female voice’.  Kathleen's other work includes  A Passionate Sisterhood [Virago], a group biography of the sisters, wives and daughters of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey, and an acclaimed biography of Katherine Mansfield 'The Storyteller'.  Her most recent biography, Norman Nicholson: The Whispering Poet, was published by The Book Mill in 2013. Kathleen has taught creative writing in a number of universities and is currently a Royal Literary Fund Fellow. Her usual abode is Cumbria.
.

We can look forward to a new collection of poetry based on the mythology and history of the First Nation Haida people of British Columbia.

Helpful Links
www.kathleenjones.co.uk

www.kathleenjonesauthor.blogspot.com

Kathleen's photos are used with permission.Thank you Kathy for sharing your very moving poetry and the story of its origins, on this week's Tuesday Poem Blog.

This week's editor Helen McKinlay lives in the top of the South Island, New Zealand. She is a published poet and as a children's author created the bestselling 'Grandma' books, which include Grandma Joins the All Blacks.

In addition to today's feature be sure to check out the wonderful poems featured by the other Tuesday Poets, using our blog roll to the left of this posting. 

A letter to Jim Harrison by Lindsay Pope

.
It may be of no surprise to you that the day
your book arrived the waxeyes at my feeder
were noisier, more nervous and more abundant
than usual. On the global face, I live on the
lower cheek of the world where the tears fall
and turn to ice. So you might not know these
little birds. They may have hitched a ride on
some seafaring boat and decided to stay. Or
perhaps they caught the tail of some cross-
Tasman wind.

Your book flew in and has roosted in my head.
I have lost contact with my former Anglican
god and pray several hours most days in my
garden.

The plants are forgiving and do not object too
much to the muck I spread around, or
even when I rest to blow cigarette smoke about
their ears. The best time to talk with them is
when the light changes in the evening. The
warm soil seems to reassure as the chill of night
begins to settle on their leaves.

This land has no snakes, which makes us a
nation fearful of them. I am learning to live
with my own.

Thanks for your poems. I like digging into their
soil. It is like harvesting new potatoes. Each
time you unearth a shaw you do not know
what the reward will be.

As I write, the waxeyes are drinking. The wind
has turned to the south, so I’ll head down the
garden path to pick a supper of beans.

©  Lindsay Pope


Posted here with permission
Editor: Mary McCallum

Lindsay Pope

Lindsay Pope lives in Nelson, New Zealand. He keeps his head down digging the soil, chopping wood, picking his supper, hanging out with his family, writing poems. He writes of a life lived on the lower cheek of the world in the path of a bitter wind that can blow in from the south. Of men like himself living domestic lives in the path of that wind, making poems and planting potatoes to shore themselves up ... and other men living more rugged, isolated lives buffeted by the natural world ... all intent on leaving a mark somehow.

Jim Harrison

The keeper of uninhabited Stephens Island is the subject of 'Island Flight', and a coastwatcher during the war is the subject of 'Outpost'. The latter was posted by Keith Westwater on Tuesday Poem last year, and in a Landfall online review by Robert McLean, who said it was one of the best poems he'd read by a New Zealand poet for some time. He talks of this poet's 'bruised, stoical, masculine voice', praising his brevity, and the way he weighs every syllable, measures each phrase.

I know Lindsay's work well, having edited and published his first full collection Headwinds, which came out last year as part of our Mākaro Press Submarine poetry series, and includes 'A letter to Jim Harrison' along with 'Outpost' and 'Island Flight'.  Such riches.

'A letter ...'  is from one poet to another, and writes of the pleasure another man's words bring. It feels like a letter in its shape, the way the thoughts come – all at once to start with, and then line by line, thought by thought – and the voice is casual and colloquial, speaking as if to a friend. But there is also a glimpse of the heightened fabular language of a poet in the way Lindsay introduces himself and the place he calls home: those tears falling to ice, plants with ears. It is this combination that nabs me as a reader (and a publisher), and I admire the economical and confident way Lindsay achieves it.

What I love about this poem is also what it says to me about poetry per se: the way it (deliciously) roosts in the head as we go about our business, and how the reading of it pulls something gleaming and new from the dark soil of our brains.

Jim Harrison, I discover, is not unlike Lindsay in the life he leads and what he writes about. Jim lives on a farm in Michigan, and the Poetry Foundation talks of his connection to rural landscapes and the way 'he often explores human and animal drives set against an unforgiving world'. I didn't discover this about Jim when editing Lindsay's book, although I really should have. The author photos speak volumes! These two ought to hang out together.

This week's editor Mary McCallum is a poet, a novelist and a publisher who lives in Wellington, New Zealand. As a writer, she has published a chapbook of poems, a novel The Blue (Penguin 2007) and a children's novel Dappled Annie and the Tigrish (Gecko Press 2014).  Her Mākaro Press publishes poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction. She founded Tuesday Poem with Claire Beynon. 

In addition to today's feature be sure to check out the wonderful poems featured by the other Tuesday Poets, using our blog roll to the left of this posting.